random thoughts – Day 1,780 – (Thursday) – sharing space

Twice in my life I have shared longish-term living space with someone to whom I wasn't married or who wasn’t a family member. Both times, there were some challenges that, to this day, make me glad I live alone.

In my college years, I spent one semester at Chamberlayne Junior College in Boston. I lived in a dorm on Commonwealth Avenue (“Comm Ave” to the locals), in a building that was a converted hotel. There was a marble lobby and a sweeping marble staircase, and some of the rooms had closed up beautiful fireplaces with gorgeous mantels.

I shared a room with Monica, a classmate from Colombia, South America. We were each initially assigned to other roommates. I never even met my original roommate, who, before I arrived, moved in with her boyfriend who went to Emerson College. Monica decided after a couple days that she didn’t like her assigned roommate, Janet from Cape Cod, because she had blue streaks in her hair and Monica said she was weird. Because I was paying for a double room, I couldn’t refuse when Monica asked to move into my temporarily single room.

Monica drove me nuts. She would wash her underpants in the sink in our room (not a problem), and hang them to dry in the room (not quite a problem) and leave them hanging, adding a new pair each day (a problem for me), until her drawer was finally empty and they all came down. Her friends were worse, though. I would arrive at our room after classes or my job and her friends would be sprawled on my bed and sitting at or on my desk, usually doing lines of coke (which Monica often complained was far inferior to what she was used to in her home town of Cali). Meanwhile, Monica’s bed and desk were pristine and unsullied. By mid-semester, things had gotten pretty tense, and Monica had actually befriended her original roommate and moved back to her original assigned room.

My new dorm roommate was Liliana, a new student who arrived at mid semester and was also from Colombia. She was studying English for the remainder of the semester and tried to teach me Spanish (unsuccessfully). We got along great and it was a much better situation than with Monica. We were both quiet and respectful and my desk was no longer covered in drug residue. Liliana made me sing "La Cucaracha" every night before bed.

My Tennessee house.

Decades later, in Tennessee, I had a house, and a year or so later, a housemate. We were dating, and he asked to move into my house after a change in his housing situation. He suggested a rent amount (which he often failed to pay) and I rearranged some of my stuff for his stuff to fit.

Tennessee dude had the idea that what was mine was his for the taking and one day, the hand mirror that I used every day disappeared from the bathroom. He had taken it to (and left it at) his art class because, in his words, I “never used it,” which he probably thought because after it was used each morning, it went back under the sink. 

Other things disappeared during the time he lived with me, including a couple of the good knives, likely left in discarded pizza boxes; my silver skull ring with yellow citrine eyes, which he had often admired and playfully (or maybe not) said he would steal; and my favorite sweater that Mummu had knit for me which was in the laundry basket awaiting a special hand wash (I am still peeved about that one after all these years).

While doing his laundry, he spilled a bunch of bleach on my favorite jeans that were in the laundry area and left them there, never mentioning it. I discovered it after the bleach had eaten holes in the denim, and I ended up cutting them into shorts.

More than once, the doors were left open on every kitchen cabinet. The first time it happened, I thought the place had been ransacked. He would often leave the front door unlocked, and one day, I came home and the door was open. Not open just a crack, but wide open and visible from the street, and he wasn’t home. Afraid I was walking into a robbery situation, I braced for the worst, but luckily, it was just another case of his carelessness.  

It was a relief when we broke up and he moved out. My stress level went way down, along with the electric and grocery bills. Since then, I have joked that my ideal cohabitation situation would be either separate wings of a large house, or separate houses. It's probably not a joke, though.